Chickpeas

Chickpeas are among the oldest cultivated foods in the Greek world, grown and eaten around the Aegean for thousands of years, and they carried households through the long fasting periods of the Orthodox calendar and through the leaner years of the country's more recent history in a way few other single ingredients did. Revithia, chickpea soup, remains genuinely everyday food in a way some other pulses are not.

The Cycladic island of Sifnos has built one specific dish, revithada, around little more than dried chickpeas, onion, olive oil, bay and a great deal of time: assembled Saturday night and left in a low oven for many hours, traditionally the village's shared wood-fired oven, ready when families returned from Sunday church. The result bears little resemblance to a quickly boiled tin of chickpeas.

Revithokeftedes, chickpea fritters seasoned with herbs and cumin, are the vegan answer to keftedes and stand on their own merits at a meze table rather than as a substitute for anyone avoiding meat, and they showcase the same pulse in a completely different, quick-cooked form from the slow bakes chickpeas are just as often used for.